Any Wednesday: Great performances, script that fails to deliver

A hint of sleaziness hangs over Muriel Resnik's Any Wednesday, a sugar-daddy escapade and her only Broadway play, a highly successful one, running for two years in the mid-'60s. It's written to be appealingly scrubby-faced sitting-room comedy — although the living room is in the apartment of a guy's mistress.

Any Wednesday, which is being given an excellent production that opened Saturday at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, came after the film The Apartment, which later became the musical Promises, Promises. All three deal with the same subject: mistresses. As I sat in an audience for Any Wednesday this past weekend, I had the same questions that struck me on Broadway a few years back, when Promises, Promises was revived. Were extramarital affairs really all the rage in the '60s? Does no one ever get hurt in these plots?

In Any Wednesday, no one seems to be hurt a bit, which makes the show way ahead of its time or flatly unrealistic, and I'm voting for the latter. It's a simple story: Man meets girl, man keeps girl in a certain lifestyle, girl meets man's wife, things should fall apart but maybe not. To make matters interesting, in Any Wednesday, girl also meets another guy who uses her to get to her man, a ruthless business tycoon who has trampled the much younger fellow in a business deal.

With its Manhattan smarties from the Upper East Side and its plot about relationships and the attractions and distractions of midcentury big-city life, Any Wednesday reminds me of many a Neil Simon play but without the clever repartee. Still, you couldn't ask for a smoother production than Tom Quinn's — he's both the director of this Any Wednesday and the head of Montgomery — and he gets fine work from the quartet of actors who offer entertaining portraits of their characters on Michael Kerns' impressive apartment set.

In the end, though, the play is more curious than funny, even though it doesn't feel dated. I can think only that it's the script, at best workmanlike, that fails to deliver. You can't find fault with the interpretations: The busy Philadelphia actor Joe Guzmán has the sugar daddy part down pat and gives us a believably despicable elitist businessman; Jessica Bedford is his young mistress and matches her great looks to clear body-movement signals to aid in her nuanced performance; Ian Lithgow has a nice homespun quality as the smalltown boy intent on bringing the tycoon to his heels.

Gerri Weagraff has the hardest part of all, as the affronted wife, to whom the script says only: Why-can't-we-all-just get along? She brings it off exceedingly well, even though the character seems not fully credible, like the play.

Any Wednesday

Through June 30 at Montgomery Theater, 124 N. Main St., Souderton. Tickets: $26-$35. Information: 215-723-9984 or www.montgomerytheater.org.